Interview: Megadeth?s David Ellefson Talks Shop About Rock Shop (Video)

rockshop2David Ellefson Rock Shop is a solid and simple guitar/bass amp-modeling app that runs on iOS. It is made by PocketLabWorks and works in conjunction with the company's iRiff Port cable/interface. In case you hadn't guessed by the name of the app, special consultation was provided by David Ellefson (bass player and founding member of Megadeth) in order to achieve the sound of his bass and guitar rigs. How does it sound? The tones, while specific to a few amps and cabinets, are quite excellent and resonant. The settings are based off Mr. Ellefson's amp setup which provides a gritty bass tone, full of attack. I liked it. (You can hear David playing through it at the PocketLabWorks website). I had a few questions about how it was developed so rather than take my usual Paneldome approach, this time I was able to track down David for a Skype call and get some info from him directly. He was kind enough to take the time to talk with me.

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As Workers Comp Costs Rise, Agents Look for Big Ways to ...

17 Apr 2012

Workers Comp CostsEarlier this month when MarketScout released its commercial insurance rates for March, Workers Compensation, along with Property, led the market with increases. Workers Comp rates increased by 4%, continuing the trend upward since late last year. National brokerage Willis confirms the rising rates, stating that about 90% of insureds are seeing rate increases on renewal, particularly in the Northeast (especially New York and New Jersey) and California. The brokerage expects rates to range from up by 2.5% to up by 7.5%.

Furthermore, in a recent 2012 P&C Workers Compensation & Safety Survey, cost containment is by far the number-one Workers Compensation insurance concern of employers for the next 12 months. Employers are also concerned about increasing exposures, renewals, and rising fraud behaviors.

As result of these increases, insurance agents are looking to help clients control costs, as all indications are that CompAPEX Workers Comp services rates will continue to rise as state funds keep asking for increases, and private carriers are looking to recover years of poor underwriting results and declining premiums with rate hikes. Part of the solution, of course, is an agency?s risk management division offering analysis of client data to flag high-cost claims in advance and help put programs in place to deal with these injuries, in addition to assisting a client in fostering a safety culture and implementing employee return to work programs.

However, many insurance agents want to give their clients results that are more immediate and tangible so they can retain customers as their renewals are coming up, and gain new clients, through premium savings. Many find a win-win solution with APEX Services and its Workers Compensation Premium Recovery program. APEX provides agencies with the ability to go in and tell customers that through a detailed analysis and audit of their Workers Comp program, they can save them money because of carrier errors and overcharges in current and past policies. What?s more, the client doesn?t have to pay for the audit, and the agents don?t have to do any of the work. In fact, APEX will conduct the audit on a contingency basis, receiving 50% of the monies recovered with the customer getting the other 50%. A 20% commission from APEX?s fee is paid to the agent/broker who offered the service.

?We recover premium dollars for 90% of the Workers Comp accounts we audit,? says Simon Feuer, president of APEX Services, ?due to the many errors that can occur with a client?s policy.?

Simon explains that over the years state and federal changes have been implemented and the insurers typically don?t go back and retroactively adjust policy rates to reflect those changes. ?A client and broker may be doing everything right with data analysis, claims management, risk management, and safety program implementation, but there are errors in premiums that go back ten years or so,? says Simon. ?We analyze everything to pinpoint where there have been overcharges and correct these mistakes.?

In fact, APEX has been so successful since opening its doors in 1994 that it has recovered more than $48 million in Workers Compensation premium overcharges for more than 3,000 customers. Clients span many industries, including healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, construction, non-profits, and food, among many others.

Examples of Apex?s success in vetting out errors and correcting experience mod factors include: A construction company with a paid premium of $950,00 that received a refund of $423,167 because of payroll omissions at the Comp Board and claims reserves revisions; a healthcare chain whose premiums since 1994 have ranged between $1-2 million received return premiums totaling over $510,000; and a manufacturer received return premiums totaling $236,120 based on paying premiums between $200,000-$300,000 since 1996.

In today?s economic landscape, strict regulatory environment, and increased expenditures including in the area of Workers Comp, making it more challenging for companies across all sectors to thrive and grow, APEX provides agencies with a service that can serve to differentiate themselves in an increasingly tough insurance market. For more information about APEX, you can contact Simon at 888.380.2739 or e-mail him at simon@apexservices.com. You can also visit: http://www.apexservices.com/.>

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Study dusts sugar coating off little-known regulation in cells

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

In Alzheimer's disease, brain neurons become clogged with tangled proteins. Scientists suspect these tangles arise partly due to malfunctions in a little-known regulatory system within cells. Now, researchers have dramatically increased what they know about this particular regulatory system in mice. Such information will help scientists better understand Alzheimer's and other diseases in humans and could eventually provide new targets for therapies.

In a study released online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition this week, the team at least doubled the number of proteins found to be subject to a type of regulation based on a sugar known as O-GlcNAc (oh-GLIK-nak). The O-GlcNAc system likely adds another layer of control to the proteins that serve as a brain cell's widgets and gears -- control that might be muddled in Alzheimer's brains known to have problems in sugar metabolism.

"We found many novel proteins providing insights into new aspects of cell biology," said analytical biochemist Feng Yang of the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and lead author on the study. "We think O-GlcNAc is fine-tuning cellular processes."

In addition to finding hundreds of proteins modified by O-GlcNAc, the team found that almost all the O-GlcNAc proteins were also subject to the most common form of protein regulation, which uses small phosphate molecules to turn proteins on and off. This suggests a larger coordination between the two regulatory systems.

"These results show there's a level of complexity about how biology operates that we've been largely blind to," said PNNL's Richard D. Smith, who leads the proteomics team at PNNL. Proteomics researchers try to understand how a cell functions based on the numbers and types of its proteins at work, which are collectively known as the proteome (PRO-tee-ohm).

"Back during the Human Genome Project, we asked, how could so few genes produce the complexity of an organism or even a single cell, and how could minor variations in our DNA explain the diversity we see all around us? Clearly the proteome is the answer," said Smith.

Sugar Switch

Proteins are the tools, gears and gadgets that run a cell. Regulatory systems within cells turn proteins on and off by attaching or detaching small molecules to the proteins, like a switch. The most common switch involve adding or removing phosphates, and biologists have known for a long time that these switches can run amiss in cancer and other diseases. Drugs affect players in the phosphate regulatory system to try to fix the errors.

A couple decades ago, researchers found that O-GlcNAc, a kind of sugar, could also work like a switch, turning proteins on or off. Scientists found proteins decorated by O-GlcNAc, as well as other proteins that attach or remove the sugar -- all essential parts to the system.

But they had trouble finding enough O-GlcNAc proteins to get the whole story. Few proteins bore the small sugar, and those that did tended to lose the accessory while being manhandled in the lab. Researchers could make up for some of these problems by starting with more tissue or cultured cells, but they knew if they wanted to look for these modifications in real-life scenarios such as clinical samples, they would need to be able to find the sugar with a small amount of starting material.

To overcome these difficulties, Smith, Yang and their colleagues at PNNL and four research institutions combined their expertise in the O-GlcNAc system with instruments developed at EMSL, DOE's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory on the PNNL campus. First they improved how they purified protein from mouse brain tissue to reinforce the sugar attached to proteins. Then they used instruments that exceled at detecting rare proteins in small samples.

In addition, they looked for the sugar-dotted proteins in mouse brain samples from engineered animals that had a mouse version of Alzheimer's. These mice make too much of three key proteins implicated in Alzheimer's disease in people, including the Tau protein, which forms the hallmark tangles in brain neurons.

Pack o' Proteins

To test how well their methods found O-GlcNAc proteins, the PNNL-led team started with tissue from either healthy or diseased mouse brain tissue. From the healthy tissue, the team found 274 different proteins marked with O-GlcNAc. Many of them sported more than one sugar molecule, because the team found a total of 458 attachment sites on those 274 proteins -- triple the number of sites found in any previous study. The large number of sites allowed the team to identify similarities between O-GlcNAc sites, as well as O-GlcNAc sites on previously unexplored proteins.

Of the 274 O-GlcNAc proteins, 106 had already been identified in other studies. That left 168 newly-identified proteins. Based on what the proteins looked like, the team classified most of them as likely being involved in cell signaling, regulating how genes are expressed, or, again, in cell scaffolding.

The O-GlcNAc-dabbed proteins held a variety of jobs, including forming part of a cell's scaffolding, or in nerve growth or in other nerve-related occupations such as learning and memory.

The PNNL-led team then looked at the proteins found in the Alzheimer's-like mouse brain. They found about a third fewer O-GlcNAc-marked proteins. That result also supports earlier work that suggested there is damaged O-GlcNAc regulation in Alzheimer's brains in people.

Fraternizing Phosphates and Other Biology

One of the more exciting things the researchers found had to do with the most common regulatory system in cells, the phosphate system. More than 98 percent of the O-GlcNAc proteins also had sites that would accept a phosphate, suggesting those proteins are also under the control of that system.

And about a quarter of the O-GlcNAc sites were close enough to the phosphate sites to interfere with that switch, suggesting cross-talk between the two types of regulation. A phosphate is smaller than O-GlcNAc and has a strong negative electrical charge. The sugar is neutral but bulkier. Those characteristics could have different effects on the structure of the protein and greatly increases the range of possible biological effects due to the complexity of the combined switching systems.

Lastly, until this study, most of the proteins known to be under O-GlcNAc control largely live their lives within the cells. But the PNNL-led team found a half-dozen proteins that had to be controlled by O-GlcNAc outside a cell, based on where their O-GlcNAc site fell on the body of the protein.

Now, the team is planning to measure both regulatory systems in concert.

"It's revealing to see how many proteins are modified. If we're going to understand biological systems, we need to understand the interplay of the different types of modifications," said Smith.

###

DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory: http://www.pnnl.gov/news

Thanks to DOE/Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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"Shock jock" Stern lawsuit vs Sirius XM thrown out

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Prize Winning LED Lightbulb to Arrive Just in Time for Earth Day [Lighting]

Philips, the Netherlands-based lightbulb manufacturer who won a 2007 congressional contest to create an energy-saving replacement for the incandescent 60-watt bulb, plans to start selling their LED bulb (the "L bulb") in stores just in time for Earth Day, this Sunday. More »


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Reed Hastings takes Comcast to task for skirting net neutrality

Reed Hastings takes comcast to task

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings let loose a mini rant on Facebook Sunday, setting his sites squarely on Comcast and its data accounting practices. Highlighting one of the arguments for net neutrality, Hastings pointed out that viewing streaming videos using the Comcast Xfinity app on his Xbox doesn't count against his monthly cap, but other services do. "If I watch last night's SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn't use up my cap at all." It's slightly odd that different rules would apply to the same device using the same connection to stream the same content from different sources -- and exactly the sort of preferential and self-promoting behavior that net neutrality advocates are afraid will become the norm in an unregulated market. Of course, Hastings is also irate because his own company would love the same preferential treatment, but hasn't been able to close any deals. For the full rant hit up the source link.

Reed Hastings takes Comcast to task for skirting net neutrality originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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MagicPlan 2.0 Arrives: Create Instant Floor Plans Using Your iPhone Or iPad?s Camera

magicplanAugmented reality isn't always totally pointless. Sorry if you think it's hugely useful to see an augmented view of tweets around you just by holding up your phone, but I like to find slightly more advanced applications using the technology. One such app, MagicPlan, fits that description. From the two-year old startup Sensopia, the MagicPlan iOS app is rolling out version 2.0 of its floor plan capturing application today, which allows you to hold up your phone then scan the dimensions of the room to create an instant floor plan.

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